The word dharma doesn't
only mean truth in the profound sense of the teachings of the Lord Buddha
and other spiritual masters, or the inner sense of ones own true path in
life; dharma means truth in the ordinary
sense of the actual facts of a situation or the scientific principles that
explain those facts.

Misconceptions about science abound in the popular media,
and they are quite popular in the professional media as well. Having so
much widely disseminated inaccurate information about something as important
as science has many unfortunate consequences.

"We cloud the minds of our readers when
we talk about scientific knowledge being true as far as it goes,
but incomplete; or when we say that scientific knowledge gets more and
more likely to be correct, but we can never really be certain that it is
true. Science is not a defective process that should produce truth, but
can't quite get the job done. We started with pre-scientific beliefs, found
various ways of improving them, and have continued doing that, improvements
following other improvements, seemingly without end. There's no reason
to expect this process to stop -- indeed, the growth of our knowledge in
almost every field is accelerating."

"Perhaps at this point we can afford
to take a good look at how the concept of truth is used in talking about
science, and ask ourselves if it really serves any useful function. The
teaching of science might well do without it, and the practice of science
seems not to need it at all. We might consider giving up the imaginary
ideal of perfect truth as a goal, and replacing it with the idea of continually
improving understanding."

"I want to explore the question of how we ever came to
expect scientific knowledge to be infallible in the first place.

Since this is not a mystery novel, I suppose it won't
hurt to give a brief outline of the plot right away. We'll start with the
Greek geometers, who took some useful facts about triangles and developed
a way of showing that they had to be true about triangles in general. This
established the idea of logical deduction as a source of certain knowledge
about the natural world.

Then we jump a two thousand years to Isaac Newton, who
developed a mathematical system that explained the movements of heavenly
bodies and objects on the earth with a single set of simple principles.
Scholars were used to thinking of logical deduction as a source of certain
knowledge, and Newton presented his principles in the form of a series
of illustrated arguments that looked a lot like geometry proofs. That's
just about the whole story, in a nutshell, except that Newton's Laws worked
so well that for over two hundred years the idea that they were correct
-- absolutely, certainly correct -- was essentially unchallenged.

By extension, scholars naturally expected that all scientific
research had the potential of yielding such impeccable results.

In this essay we'll look at some of the details of this
history, and at some of the problems with these highly influential over-
generalizations. Hopefully, taking a look at how these ideas emerged and
how they fell from grace may help us get free from the tangled mess we
find ourselves in today."

Science is not a new kind of knowledge; it is not created
only by a professional elite; and "The Scientific Method" is really many
methods, including aspects of basic intelligence found in infants and animals.

In these articles I discuss some serious problems with the
ways we have been thinking about schools and what they should be doing,
and some general principles for beginning to understand how to let them
do a better job of helping students learn, as well as specific changes,
at each level of the process, that can give teachers, parents, communities
and students a better chance of working successfully together to build
a mutually respectful, sustainable community.

Blaming students for failures to meet standards set by
the schooling system and its employees is contrary to logic, and counter-productive.

"School systems know that a certain percentage of their
students will fail. After a relatively short time, they know who those
failing students will be -- they will be the ones who failed before. Since
the system forces everyone to participate in this learning contest, those
who have failed will have many opportunities to fail again, and again.
We are teaching these people that they are not who they should be. How
many of them have the personal integrity to reject this arrogant slander,
which our schooling system puts into the mouths of so many figures of authority?
Of those who do have that much strength of character, how many will not
simply give up on the schools; how many will also have the tolerance to
continue trying to work with a system that has treated them so shabbily,
and which continues to do so year after year?"

At every level, many variables (things we could change)
affect current and future educational success. Of those many variables,
most have small effects, but a few variables affect educational success
profoundly. This article is about those few, immensely powerful variables,
and what we might well do about them. We start with preventing prenatal
malnutrition, and go on through infancy, day care, preschool, and beyond.

"Even if your main focus is saving the taxpayers' money,
one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that all
the students in your community succeed in school."

In our modern world, dominated so thoroughly by Western material
success, not only our schooling systems but our health care systems as
well have come resemble industrial assembly lines. People with health problems
become "patients," a word that shows just how little contribution we are
expected to make to the healing process. We are to wait (patiently) for
experts to evaluate us and assign treatments. What we can do to help is
to comply with their instructions and take our medications on time.

If treating people like defective machines worked, and
there were no alternatives, it might be acceptable. Fortunately, there
are alternatives. Unfortunately, they are rarely available and even more
rarely understood by health care practitioners. My goal here is to point
out some ancient and modern wisdoms of healing and healthy living, as a
first step toward making humane health care standard practice.

"Imagine a medical tradition, highly effective, offering
medicines that produce no lasting negative side effects, sustainably using
resources of the natural environment, and fostering basic sanity and compassion
as the essential basis of health and well-being. Tibetan Buddhist medicine,
as practiced throughout a vast area of central Asia for many hundreds of
years, was such a tradition."

"Evaluation research can explore whether Tibetan physicians,
using traditional methods of diagnosis and treatment, are successful in
treating various health problems, or in helping to prevent them. However,
designing studies that will truly and fairly address that question presents
a real challenge. Specifically, studies that impose restrictions on various
aspects of the Tibetan doctor's work are inadequate for assessing the full
potential of Tibetan medicine."

"Energy Flowing Through A System Tends To Organize That
System" -- "Hildred Schuell learned how to gradually cure aphasic patients
by protecting the flow of communication during therapy sessions, by removing
the element of panic and struggle."